Today, we're making it easier for people to financially contribute to Ubuntu if they want to. By introducing a 'contribute' screen as part of the desktop download process, people can choose to financially support different aspects of Canonical's work: from gaming and apps, developing the desktop, phone and tablet, to co-ordination of upstreams or supporting Ubuntu flavours. It's important to note that Ubuntu remains absolutely free, financial contribution remains optional and it is not required in order to download the software.

By allowing Ubuntu users to choose which elements of Ubuntu they're most excited about, we'll get direct feedback on which favourite features or projects deserve the bulk of our attention. We're letting users name their price -- depending on the value that they put on the operating system or other aspects of our work. That price can, of course, be zero -- but every last cent helps make Ubuntu better.

As this notes, even if people don't offer money, their views on what's important to them can still be gathered, and that's valuable information for developers who need to prioritize their work.

In principle, letting people support new features of interest sounds like a good idea, since it gives users a chance to vote with their wallets. But it comes in the wake of a plan to let people search for items on sites like Amazon from within the Ubuntu operating system, for which Canonical would presumably get paid if purchases were made as a result. As the hundreds of comments on the blog of Mark Shuttleworth, the founder of Canonical and Ubuntu, indicate, this has raised a number of concerns about privacy and the direction of the Ubuntu project.

Some might see both moves as evidence that Canonical still isn't making as much money from the Ubuntu ecosystem as it needs to, and that Shuttleworth is looking to bolster income. Four years ago, he admitted that Canonical was "not close" to breaking even, and that it would "require time and ongoing investment" to make it do so. Given Ubuntu's place as probably the most popular GNU/Linux distribution, users must hope that Shuttleworth will still be happy to invest in Canonical, and hence in Ubuntu, for a while yet. Perhaps that's another good reason for Ubuntu fans to start paying at least some of the development costs under the new scheme.

Have you heard of Donnie McClurkin, French Montana or Grupo Bryndis? If you haven't you're not alone. They are artists whose sales ranks on Amazon are 4,752, 17,000 and 183,187, respectively. These are all working artists who live well outside the mainstream - no steady rotation on broadcast radio, no high profile opening slots on major tours, no front page placement in online retail. What they also have in common is a steady income from Pandora. In the next twelve months Pandora is on track to pay performance fees of $100,228, $138,567 and $114,192, respectively, for the music we play to their large and fast-growing audiences on Pandora.

And that's just the tip of the iceberg. For over two thousand artists Pandora will pay over $10,000 dollars each over the next 12 months (including one of my favorites, the late jazz pianist Oscar Peterson), and for more than 800 we'll pay over $50,000, more than the income of the average American household. For top earners like Coldplay, Adele, Wiz Khalifa, Jason Aldean and others Pandora is already paying over $1 million each. Drake and Lill Wayne are fast approaching a $3 million annual rate each.

Of course, while all of this is happening, Pandora is not yet profitable, and may never be profitable -- as it is required, under current webcasting rates, to pay about 50% of its revenue out as royalties (while terrestrial radio and satellite radio get to pay much, much less). As Tim Westergren has pointed out, because of the crazy rates, plenty of other webcasting operations have just left the business entirely -- meaning that there just aren't that many players in this space, because it just isn't profitable for the companies, even as they're developing important new revenue streams for artists.

I'll have more on this later, but it often seems that legacy players really have no concept of "the golden goose." They assume that any tech company, who is moderately successful in getting users, simply should be bled dry, paying out just about everything to artists, with nothing left for the companies themselves. They think that the music is the entire value, and the service provided is not very important. And yet, without that service, none of that money would come in at all. At some point, the legacy guys are going to have to realize that they're better off having a healthy ecosystem of services, rather than squeezing the absolute highest rates out of these companies, in a way where they can't survive.